Eat First, Talk Later by Beth Yahp

Author:Beth Yahp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

J. W. W. Birch, the first British Resident of Perak, was speared through the attap walls of his bathhouse one evening. This stiff-upper-lipped representative of the British Crown was a pain: irritable and arrogant, speaking no Malay and considering local customs such as slavery barbaric. He turned up his nose and wouldn’t take off his shoes. He wanted to abolish the chieftains’ tax collections while collecting taxes for the British. The newly installed Sultan Abdullah and his Malay chiefs found that they’d got more than they bargained for when signing the Treaty of Pangkor a year earlier, in 1874, thereby gaining the palace but placing Perak under British ‘protection’.

Birch was speared by Dato’ Maharajalela, who as well as executioner was a wealthy slave-trader of orang asli, indigenous people. Long before the man who disposed of Birch became a street name in Kuala Lumpur, replacing Birch’s own street name after independence, the word maharajalela would become a verb, bermaharajalela, denoting ‘a person who does whatever he pleases, regardless of the law’. Only much later would Maharajalela become a national hero, one of a handful of revered Malay anti-colonial freedom fighters.

The British reacted swiftly and with force in the ensuing, short-lived Perak War, and Maharajalela and his cohorts were hanged. Sultan Abdullah, his wives, younger children, and members of his court were exiled to the Seychelles. They were bundled into a steamship in Singapore with a British police inspector as bodyguard and translator, and an escort of eight other police. After a month on the high seas, traversing the cyclone belt of the Indian Ocean, they arrived on Mahé in 1877. Nowadays Mahé Island, arising like a brighter jewel from the crystalline ocean, may be a honeymoon destination, but in those days it was a prison.

The ex-sultan and his entourage would languish there for 17 years – taking with them the banane mille, Malaya’s miraculous 1000-handed banana, to invigorate the Seychelles banana industry, and the mangosteen, which would become ‘the queen of the fruits and the food of the gods in the Antilles’. They would while away their time by collecting beautiful walking canes, dabbling in agriculture, learning to play local folksongs on piano and violin, producing seven more princes and princesses, and playing cricket with the chief civil commissioner and chief justice at the Victoria Club. The ex-sultan never stopped claiming his innocence in the uprising and petitioning to go home. Over the years, he was joined in this isolated ‘dumping ground’ for undesirable characters and deposed leaders from the far reaches of the British Empire: an Ashanti and two Ugandan kings, a sultan from Somaliland, a pr e-tender to the throne of Zanzibar and an Egyptian Pasha, among others.

In time some of the exiles were pardoned, and most eventually left the Seychelles. Allowed back in Tanah Melayu, Sultan Abdullah would remain restricted first in Singapore, then Penang, island-hopping his way closer and closer before finally being allowed home to Perak, old and infirm, a few months before his death. Some

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